I'm an Assistant Professor of Economics at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, a Research Fellow with the Oakland, California-based Independent Institute, a Senior Fellow with the Beacon Center of Tennessee, and a Senior Research Fellow with the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics. I'm on Twitter: @artcarden.

Let's Be Blunt: It's Time to End the Drug War

April 20 is the counter-culture “holiday” on which lots and lots of people come together to advocate marijuana legalization (or just get high). Should drugs—especially marijuana—be legal? The answer is “yes.” Immediately. Without hesitation. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200 seized in a civil asset forfeiture. The war on drugs has been a dismal failure. It’s high time to end prohibition. Even if you aren’t willing to go whole-hog and legalize all drugs, at the very least we should legalize marijuana.

For the sake of the argument, let’s go ahead and assume that everything you’ve heard about the dangers of drugs is completely true. That probably means that using drugs is a terrible idea. It doesn’t mean, however, that the drug war is a good idea.

Prohibition is a textbook example of a policy with negative unintended consequences. Literally: it’s an example in the textbook I use in my introductory economics classes (Cowen and Tabarrok, Modern Principles of Economics if you’re curious) and in the most popular introductory economics textbook in the world (by N. Gregory Mankiw).The demand curve for drugs is extremely inelastic, meaning that people don’t change their drug consumption very much in response to changes in prices. Therefore, vigorous enforcement means higher prices and higher revenues for drug dealers. In fact, I’ll defer to Cowen and Tabarrok—page 60 of the first edition, if you’re still curious—for a discussion of the basic economic logic:

The more effective prohibition is at raising costs, the greater are drug industry revenues. So, more effective prohibition means that drug sellers have more money to buy guns, pay bribes, fund the dealers, and even research and develop new technologies in drug delivery (like crack cocaine). It’s hard to beat an enemy that gets stronger the more you strike against him or her.

People associate the drug trade with crime and violence; indeed, the newspapers occasionally feature stories about drug kingpins doing horrifying things to underlings and competitors. These aren’t caused by the drugs themselves but from the fact that they are illegal (which means the market is underground) and addictive (which means demanders aren’t very price sensitive).

Those same newspapers will also occasionally feature articles about how this or that major dealer has been taken down or about how this or that quantity of drugs was taken off the streets. Apparently we’re to take from this the idea that we’re going to “win” the war on drugs. Apparently. It’s alleged that this is only a step toward getting “Mister Big,” but even if the government gets “Mister Big,” it’s not going to matter. Apple didn’t disappear after Steve Jobs died. Getting “Mr. Big” won’t win the drug war. As I pointed out almost a year ago, economist and drug policy expert Jeffrey Miron estimates that we would have a lot less violence without a war on drugs.

At the recent Association of Private Enterprise Education conference, David Henderson from the Naval Postgraduate School pointed out the myriad ways in which government promises to make us safer in fact imperil our safety and security. The drug war is an obvious example: in the name of making us safer and protecting us from drugs, we are actually put in greater danger. Without meaning to, the drug warriors have turned American cities into war zones and eroded the very freedoms we hold dear.

Freedom of contract has been abridged in the name of keeping us “safe” from drugs. Private property is less secure because it can be seized if it is implicated in a drug crime (this also flushes the doctrine of “innocent until proven guilty” out the window). The drug war has been used as a pretext for clamping down on immigration. Not surprisingly, the drug war has turned some of our neighborhoods into war zones. We are warehousing productive young people in prisons at an alarming rate all in the name of a war that cannot be won.

Albert Einstein is reported to have said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. By this definition, the drug war is insane. We are no safer, and we are certainly less free because of concerted efforts to wage war on drugs. It’s time to stop the insanity and end prohibition.

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by that reasoning it was a choice to drink alcohol in the 20′s. It didn’t make it a wrong thing to do, just an illegal thing. Just like it’s illegal to use offensive language in the presence of female human beings in some states. It is illegal, and a cop can bust you and a judge will convict you. is it right? no.

Your ideals are very outdated. You stand by a failing system standing behind the argument, its illegal because its illegal, and if you do it you’re a criminal. By your logic alcohol should still be illegal because of prohibition, the government at one point said it was illegal to use alcohol and all those who do should go to jail. The same argument you use. Yet no one stopped drinking, prices rose, mobsters like Al Capone came to power and spurred large amounts of violence and profited from prohibition. The government saw the error in its ways and dropped alcohol prohibition. From a science/health standpoint the substance marijuana is far safer than both alcohol consumption and/or cigarrettes, two legal substances. Marijuana has a mortality rate of 0, it takes 40,000 times the normal dose that gets you high to kill you. To contrast that so you can wrap your head around it, alcohol only takes 10 to 15 times the dose for intoxication to kill you. Studies have shown that marijuana smoke does not carry the harmful toxins that cigarette smoke carries and smoking recreationally does not effect lung function. Lastly, the idea that “stoners” are all lazy people who don’t contribute to society and should all be behind bars is erroneous. As people who have confessed to smoking marijuana consist of Barack Obama, Carl Sagan, Michael Phelps, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, The Beatles, Steve Jobs (who did a lot more than just marijuana), Richard Branson, Stephen King, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Willie Nelson, the list literally goes on. These people are more than contributing members of society, they are leaders in there fields and have gone on to do great things. They also made there choice to do drugs, by your mentality they should all have gone to jail and not gone on to… win 8 olympic gold medals, or become president, or invent the ipod etc. The truth is that marijuana is not nearly as bad as the government slander and propaganda make it out to be. Thomas Jefferson said “If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so.”. People did so in the 1920′s with alcohol prohibition, and people are doing just the same now with marijuana. Its only a matter of time before the truth disrupts the fear-mongering.

IT IS unjust imprisonment because the law is unjust, just like the laws against homosexuality in Iran and laws against women in many parts of the world are unjust, and like the laws against blacks used to be. Saying something like “it’s the law, period” is extremely childish. It used to be the law not to pay tax to the British Empire, but if the citizens of your country hadn’t challenged the law and rebelled against it, you’d still be under our thumb. If you’re sick and tired of the whining, you’d better hide in a cave for the rest of your life, because we’re not going to stop until drugs are legalised.

Gosh, Chris, use your brain, for f***’s sake! If all the police around the world lost their jobs because they haven’t got any work to do, and were then put to do something more constructive instead, wouldn’t that be fantastic news?